Anna Nicole Smith: wasn't that the Playboy model who'd married a moribund millionaire? The overweight slimming-company spokesperson? Hadn't she just had a baby? Hadn't her son then died of a drug overdose in her hospital room? It seemed impossible that all of these things could have happened to the same woman. It was garish, calamitous and more than just a tabloid story. Over time, people began to refer to it as 'an American Tragedy'.

The intensity of the US coverage was extraordinary. Major cable-news channels covered little else, mentioning her hundreds of times a day, compared to (according to one organisation that produced a tally of three stations) 20 references to Iraq. Internet sites continually crashed. She was on the front page of every tabloid for weeks. It seemed like so much spillage: everything about her life and her death was in a state of unravelling.

Anna Nicole Smith could not be contained - least of all by her clothes, into which she could be seen, in posthumously played clips from her reality-TV show, constantly tucking herself, whispering sweet nothings to her ample implants as she ushered them into tops several sizes too small. And yet, despite the inordinate revelations, there was also something opaque about it all. How to find any purchase on such a sprawling story? No one seemed to really know her - she hadn't spoken to her mother in years; her sister had met her only once; at least three separate people claimed to be the father of her five-month-old child - and yet everyone talked. All those involved (mother, lovers, siblings, friends, former employees) had either signed an exclusive big-money deal with a TV company or published a book.

The Washington Post called her 'a postmodern pin-up for a tabloid age', and asserted that she had 'got under our skin'. People were heard to ask one another: 'Will you always remember where you were when Anna Nicole Smith died?' However trashy she seemed, Anna Nicole Smith appeared to say something. But what?

I wondered what it meant that the kind of press coverage given in England to the death of Princess Diana had finally been matched in the US by this overblown, badly used, gold-digging Texan topless model. If the population of Great Britain poured itself into the myth of Diana, what kind of vessel for collective American fascination was Anna Nicole Smith? The New York Times columnist Caryn James observed that 'her career ultimately says more about the culture's fascination with celebrity than it does about Anna Nicole Smith' - in other words, she was all about us. Some observers of pop culture went so far as to suggest that her legacy was akin to that of a conceptual artist: she pushed the limits of celebrity so far that, by watching her, we came to understand something about the nature of fame.

One night at dinner, some days into this circus, I found myself speaking about it to a writer who (as I happened to know) harboured a guilty addiction to gossip. I said I couldn't stop thinking about Anna Nicole Smith. He said he couldn't either. For a moment, it felt as though we might need to form some sort of recovery programme. And then he told me something that has stayed with me ever since. He said: 'The thing I can't work out is, did she have good life or a bad life?'

Obviously, I thought he was crazy. 'What are you talking about?' I said. 'The woman had the most miserable life on the planet.'

'No,' he said. 'What I mean is: it might look miserable to you or me, but did she have the life she wanted?'

He was right. It was a perfect question. Because although her life and her death look like a greatest hits of blow-out tragedy, if you break them down into their component parts, each of them looks like a kind of success story. She modelled herself on Marilyn Monroe ('I told him that I wanted to be buried in the same concrete thing as Marilyn Monroe,' she once said of her late husband); she sometimes claimed Marilyn was her mother, though Monroe died five years before she was born. Like Monroe, she wanted to die before she was 40, and she did die just weeks before her 40th birthday. Hugh Hefner said he was mourning a dear friend; Donald Trump was said to have dated her. She had positioned herself perfectly at the all-American intersection of sex, fame, money, and tragic death.

These mythical, national obsessions had been fashioned in her case according to her will. Whatever the coroner may have said about her death being accidental, it's questionable whether any of her life - in the grand, scripted scheme of the achievements she had in mind - could be construed as entirely unintentional.

Sex

On The Anna Nicole Show, which ran on the E! channel from 2002 to 2004, the eponymous star was seen talking about sex constantly - laughing as her dog humped a stuffed toy, testing beds in other people's houses by clutching the headboard and bouncing on them, saying she had to go home to masturbate. Over the years, countless people claim to have seen her in swimming pools with lovers of both sexes. She even claimed she'd had sex with a ghost. Her son's former nanny, Maria Cerrato, took her to court for sexual harassment and won $850,000. Sex is what was expected of her. What other people might construe as a private life is the most public thing about Anna Nicole Smith. Where did it all begin?

When Vickie Lynn Hogan, as she was originally named, was born in Houston, Texas on 28 November 1967, her father had already raped her aunt. Aunt Kay, her mother's sister, was only 10 years old at the time, and Donald Hogan was kicked out of the house when Vickie was a baby. He pleaded guilty to that rape and to that of another underage girl, and spent six months in jail. Then he started a second family. Vickie's mother, Virgie, spent her life trying to keep her away from her father, and Vickie resented her violently as a result, though her mother was right about the risk: Donald Hogan sexually abused the other daughters he went on to have. One of them, Donna Hogan, remembers driving past Vickie's house, and having her father point out her half-sister to her. The siblings finally met when Vickie was 23 - she had hired a private detective to track down her father, who as it turned out had always lived close by. (He has now retired, and spends his time in bars singing covers of country-and-western songs.)

When she went to high school, Vickie left her mother's house (Virgie, a deputy sheriff, had never got along with her daughter, and was known to handcuff her as punishment) and moved in with her Aunt Kay in the small Texan town of Mexia. She was unpopular in high school, she later said, because she was flat-chested. She was expelled after getting into a fist fight, and took a job at a roadside restaurant called Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken.

Before long, she had fallen in love with Billy Smith, a spotty, limp-haired 16-year-old fried-food cook. In 1985, at the age of 18, she asked him to marry her. Later, Smith claimed he hardly abused her at all - in fact, he only remembered kicking her once - but either way, within a year or so, Vickie was out. She took her six-month-old baby Daniel, dropped him off with her mother, and moved into a trailer park in Houston with a hairdresser she knew, who transformed her mousy hair to blonde.

She got a day job at a topless bar, but found she couldn't get hired for the more lucrative night-time spot unless she did something about her figure. People who knew her in the first place she worked at - Rick's Cabaret - remembered her as 5ft11in and 160lb, big everywhere 'except where it counted'. Much later, she would say that her large breasts had come about with her pregnancy and never left her, but Eric Redding, who later became her manager and co-wrote a book about her with his wife D'Eva (Sex Bomb: The Anna Nicole Smith Story), believes she was operated on by a famous Texas surgeon named Gerald Johnson, who performed up to 17 such surgeries a day. When a friend admired her 42DD cleavage (they were later rumoured to have grown to a FF cup, requiring specially made bras), Vickie reportedly said: 'Feel them babies all you want. You're looking at $14,000 worth of work here. Hell, I could have bought myself a truck for what these damn things cost.'

She got gigs at other bars - Leggs, Baby O's, Gigi's Cabaret - made money on the side in their parking lots, and developed a trademark baby voice modelled on Marilyn Monroe's. Then, spotting an ad placed in a magazine by recruiters for Playboy, she turned up at a photographer's studio that would change her fortunes. The photographer was Eric Redding. He thought she was beautiful, he recalls, but felt sorry for her - she seemed so childlike. She sat shaking in her chair, and explained that she felt awkward about taking her clothes off in such an intimate setting. While she danced topless for a living and aspired to model nude, she said she had never had sex with the lights on.

In the questionnaire she filled out to accompany her test shots, she wrote that her ambitions in life were to become a Playmate and to have a daughter. Asked if there was one thing she would change about her character, she said: 'I'm too kind-hearted at times. People take advantage of me.'

Fame

'My whole life revolves around my breasts,' Anna Nicole Smith once said. 'Everything I have is because of them.' It was true, though when their big break came she wasn't entirely prepared. 'I thought you said they were going to fly me to Los Angeles!' Vickie complained to Eric Redding when Playboy arranged for her to stay in Hefner's mansion. 'But they're not. They're flying me to California.'

Her limited geographical knowledge did not get in her way. Vickie was chosen for the March 1992 cover of Playboy, on which she featured as a sophisticated, black ballgown-clad version of Jayne Mansfield - a 'post-debutante', as the cover line put it. She was paid $500. Two months later, she was given a centrefold ($20,000) and when she was voted Playmate of the Year, she received $100,000 and a brand new Jaguar. And when Paul Marciano of the Guess? jeans company spotted her magazine spreads, he knew he wanted her to replace Claudia Schiffer and Eva Herzigova in their ad campaigns. She was offered a three-year, multi-million-dollar contract, and given the name Anna Nicole Smith. She took small roles in prominent films - most notably, The Hudsucker Proxy and Naked Gun 33 1/3 - and became a bona-fide celebrity. At Christmas, she gave her family autographed Guess? books and calendars as presents. Vickie Lynn was well and truly over.

'I love the paparazzi,' she said. 'I've always liked attention. I didn't get very much growing up, and I've always wanted to be, you know, noticed.' It wasn't that she was famous for being famous, exactly; it was more that, as her life went on and the most reasonable grounds for her celebrity disappeared, fame remained the idiom of her existence. She appeared at the Vanity Fair Oscar party wildly overweight and barely able to walk, with lipstick smeared all over her face - yet no one could take their eyes off her, and that, to her, was what mattered. Her TV show, an unflinching self-portrait of a one-woman car crash, was a critical disaster - yet a second series was commissioned because the viewing figures were astronomical.

Money and fame were the only currencies she knew, and the people around her - no strangers to those values themselves - were familiar with the rate of exchange. Towards the end, Anna and her family only communicated with each other via TV shows on which they were paid to appear. When asked about her daughter's health, Virgie would say, as if this gave her more authority than any other member of the public: 'In the last interview I saw of her, she was so wasted.' When she wanted to warn her daughter about the dangers of drugs, Virgie said she addressed her via CNN.

Money

In her new book, Train Wreck: The Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith, Donna Hogan writes that she always felt that her half-sister's claims to have grown up poor were exaggerated. She always seemed so much better off than herself, Donna felt. David Granoff, her former publicist and one of her few remaining defenders, says that 'all of a sudden her family's saying she was middle class. I don't believe that.' (A boyfriend of Anna's once described her extended family as 'poor, trashy and lost'.) Had she really stolen toilet paper from restaurants because she had none?

Whatever her financial circumstances, there was someone in her life who had been determined to improve them, from way back when she was Vickie Smith, working at Gigi's Cabaret in Houston. J Howard Marshall II was an octogenarian oil billionaire who had been married twice and who had a mistress named Lady Walker, whom he'd met when she was dancing in a topless bar in Houston. For years, he had plied Lady with expensive gifts: jewellery, cars, two houses - one of which had a swimming pool with her name in tiles on the bottom. In 1991, Lady scheduled some plastic surgery for herself. She and Marshall had been fighting, and the night before her operation - so the story goes - she updated her will, leaving her $5.8 million estate (made up of gifts from Marshall) to her three children. She died on the operating table. Marshall sued Lady's heirs for all he had ever given her, and settled 18 months later, getting most of it back.

Around the time of Lady's death - in fact, a good few months before - Marshall visited Gigi's Cabaret and met Vickie Smith. He immediately fell in love with her, and with her sweet-talking baby voice (she called him 'Paw-Paw' and 'Poopsie Baby'). He would pass her envelopes across the table. Upon opening them, she would find anything from $1,000 to $5,000 in cash.

It wasn't until 1992, when Anna became famous in her own right, that the couple went fully public. Marshall took her out to country clubs, and ostentatiously bought her jewellery. Then on 27 June 1994, before 11 guests of the bride and none of the groom, Anna Nicole Smith married J Howard Marshall II at the White Dove Wedding Chapel in Houston. The groom was ushered into the ceremony in a white tuxedo and a wheelchair. He was unable to stand for any part of it, and when his less than blushing bride leaned down to kiss him, his bald head seemed cadaverously close to drowning in her cleavage. A brief reception was held in a side room; then Anna waved goodbye to her new husband, and left for Greece on the arm of her tall, black, superfit ex-con bodyguard.

Though she dispatched accusations that she had married him for his money with the defence that he had been begging her to marry him for four years, the couple's spectacular 63-year-age difference gave Anna Nicole Smith newfound fame as 'America's No 1 gold-digger'. The gags came thick and fast. David Letterman hypothesised about her pick-up line: 'Can I pre-chew that for you?' Jay Leno said she'd told him to act his age, 'and he died'. 'She lives to hear him say those three little words,' Leno joked, '"I can't breathe".'

In fact, it looked as though that might come about sooner rather than later. Within six months of their marriage, Marshall was so ill that his son E Pierce Marshall, to whom he'd given power of attorney over his estate, cut off Anna and refused to let her see him. Her bills were not paid and her allowance, which had been $50,000 a month, was stopped; she took Marshall Junior to court to demand visitation rights, and was granted the occasional half-hour slot, after which she was escorted from her husband's house by armed guards. The couple had never actually lived together, and on 4 August 1995, 403 days after their wedding, J Howard Marshall II died.

Three days later, Anna staged a private memorial service at the funeral home: so private that she invited People magazine and several cable channels to cover it. She wore her white wedding dress, and wept as she sang, accompanied by the strains of a white baby-grand piano, 'Wind Beneath My Wings'. A week after that, at the same place, the official service, to which Anna was not invited, was held by Marshall's family. The head of the funeral home had his work cut out for him keeping the two factions apart. 'I handled the Howard Hughes funeral,' he was quoted as saying at the time, 'and this one's worse.'

Of course, the real issue was not whether Marshall would be buried or cremated (though Anna insisted that he'd asked to be buried next to her, in whatever space there was left after Anna had joined corpses with Marilyn Monroe). That was easily fixed: he was cremated, and each party got half the ashes, which Anna could later be seen kissing on her TV show. The issue was what to do with the $1.6 billion. Anna didn't sue E Pierce Marshall for all of it, or even half of it. She sued for spousal support of half his earnings during the time they were married. Marshall contended that she'd already received what she demanded, in the form of gifts. The tally he kept was as follows:

House in Los Angeles: $597,000

Jewellery: $2,804,000

Living expenses: $318,000

Modelling clothes: $699,000

Ranch in Texas: $693,000

Ranch furnishings: $230,000

Car: $20,000

Second car: $82,000

Misc: $439,000

Total: $6,607,000

Anna's response was that all of that jewellery had either been lost or stolen. 'How could you have lost that much jewellery?' Marshall's lawyer asked.

'Oh,' she replied, 'I used to be a real ditz.'

The legal battle - which remains ongoing - has now survived both parties to the dispute. E Pierce Marshall died last year, at the age of 67. Until that moment, the long-running suit had had its momentous episodes. Fought in probate court, in federal court, in Texas, in California, and finally - unbelievably - in the US Supreme Court, the case went through various judgments, including one that Anna Nicole Smith should receive nothing, another that she should receive $475 million (after a bankruptcy judge ruled that Pierce Marshall had altered documents to cheat her out of the money), and one that she be given $88 million.

Last May, the Supreme Court - to which it had been taken in order to ascertain whose jurisdiction such a case could come under - ruled that Anna Nicole Smith had a right to pursue the $88 million the federal judge had decided upon, but the Supreme Court did not resolve the dispute.

In the middle of all this, Anna Nicole Smith could be seen wearing a smart black skirt suit and heavy black eyeliner, her hair bleached to infinity, emerging from the highest court in the land. It was an extraordinary moment: never mind the mingling of high and low culture, this woman who always strove to be noticed had attained a degree of visibility - not just in Texas or in LA but in Washington DC - that she could hardly have predicted. And next to her was a man familiar to viewers of her TV show, who suddenly looked like he might soon be cashing in a very hefty fee: Howard Number Two. Howard K Stern, Anna's zealous confidant and attorney, had booted out her friend and publicist David Granoff, and founded a talent agency in an effort to represent every aspect of her life himself. When Anna fought with family members, with friends, with her decorator, all of them said she was spending too much time with a single man who was intent on controlling her. The name of Stern's talent agency? 'Hot Smoochie Lips'. Anna Nicole Smith was his only client.

Death

Death had been a possibility since the early years of her fame. In her days as a dancer, she carried around little bags of prescription tranquillisers and popped them as she drank. She took cocaine, she took ecstasy, she took pills to get to sleep, pills to wake up and pain killers if she so much as stubbed her toe. She was first hospitalised for a drug overdose in February 1994. Later that year, her bodyguard Pierre DeJean claimed he'd saved her life when she had tried to slit her wrists. At least twice the following year, an ambulance took her to the emergency room after she'd had seizures her then-lawyer, Diana Marshall, said were due to migraine pills. And then she was admitted to the Betty Ford Clinic.

Towards the end of her life there were other rumours - that she had taken methadone while pregnant, in order to come off heroin; that she had been seen holding a gun to her head and telling her son she would blow her brains out; that Howard Stern had to fish her out of a swimming pool in which he found her lying face down.

On 7 September 2006, Anna gave birth in the Bahamas, where she had recently taken up residence, to the daughter she had always wanted. Her 20-year-old son Daniel flew in to see the baby, and while he was at her bedside, three days after the birth, he suddenly collapsed and died. He had taken a lethal combination of tranquillisers - Zoloft and Lexapro - and they were mixed with methadone. She always said: 'I'm going to die young,' says David Granoff, who had known Daniel since he was small. 'Well, that's fine for her. But for a kid having to worry about her all through the years - seeing her experience poverty, riches, poverty again, being in the limelight - I think depression hit him like a ton of bricks.' It was not clear where the methadone had come from, but at least two people later said they were prepared to testify at an inquest that Howard Stern had given it to him, and that he had been in the room when he died. (After Anna's death, Donna Hogan, who had not seen her half-sister for at least a decade, appeared on Fox News saying she held Stern responsible for both tragedies, and that the family would do everything they could to bring charges against him.) Stern denied the accusations vigorously - on Entertainment Tonight, with which he and Anna had signed an exclusive, high-paying contract.

Grotesque sums of money hovered at the edges of each disaster. Anna sold pictures of her son to a tabloid for half a million dollars. She sold video footage of her Caesarean section for, reportedly, double that. And just when it all seemed so empty, Trimspa, the slimming company whose spokeswoman Anna had been for years, was fined $1.5 million by the Federal Trade Commission for false advertising. They were ordered to reimburse their customers, because the product simply did not work.

Four days before her death, Anna Nicole Smith and a private nurse checked into the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. It was not known exactly why she needed a private nurse, but one of her lawyers, Ron Rale, later said that she'd been suffering from flu-like symptoms. Howard Stern was in Florida with them - they were planning to buy a yacht.

From Monday 5 February 2007, which was the day she arrived at the hotel, other guests reported that she was 'completely out of it', and that she needed help standing up and sitting down. Some witnessed her being carried out from the audience at a boxing match, others said they saw her downing stunning amounts of alcohol. On Wednesday, she hit her head on the bathtub, and late on Thursday morning, she reportedly lay down for a nap, feeling feverish and sick. At 1:39pm her nurse called the front desk and asked for an ambulance. When the emergency services arrived, they called headquarters: 'She's not breathing, she's not responsive. She's, um, actually Anna Nicole Smith.'

Anna Nicole Smith was pronounced dead at 2:49pm on 8 February, in a medical centre with a wing named for Joe DiMaggio, who was once married to Marilyn Monroe. The coroner's toxicology report, which was not released until 26 March, revealed that she had died of an 'accidental overdose' of prescription drugs, each of which was at 'therapeutic levels' but which together turned out to be lethal. Among them were three separate tranquillisers - Ativan, Klonopin and Valium - and a sleeping medication, chloral hydrate. No methadone was found in her body.

Fame again

When Anna's daughter was born, it was not known who the father was, but this seemed relatively unimportant until Daniel died. At that moment, the baby - Danielynn, as she was named, for her late brother and her mother - became the sole heir to Anna's potential fortune. Before they had even planned a funeral service for Daniel, Howard Stern 'married' Anna Nicole Smith on a boat in the Bahamas, and put his name down as the father on Danielynn's birth certificate. (The marriage, it turned out, was not legal; he later said they had planned to get married properly, but that his future wife's death had intervened.) Members of her family have claimed that Anna tried to reach them the day that Daniel died, but by the time they called back Howard Stern had changed all her phone numbers.

When Anna died, the stakes got even higher: the baby was not really a baby (she was not, for instance, with her mother when she died in Florida, nor did Stern think to collect her until three days later, at which point her paternity had been called so furiously into question that he had to do so in a secret location).

She was just a bundle of possible cash. Whoever was the father would have - if the court case progressed and Anna's heir triumphed - millions of dollars to spend on her behalf. And so, the contenders came forward: Larry Birkhead, a photographer who had met Anna two years earlier at the Kentucky Derby and claimed to have had a relationship with her up until she was five months pregnant. Stern, who asserted his supremacy because he was already there, behaving as though the baby were his daughter. Prince Frederick von Anhalt, a man who had reputedly bought his title by arranging to be adopted as an adult, said he had been engaged in a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith, though he was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor. He claimed that he had promised to make Anna a princess, and had filled out adoption papers for her (so that he could extend the same courtesy to her that his adopted mother had to him) but Zsa Zsa refused to sign them.

A former bodyguard, Alexander Denk, claimed paternity too. Anna's mother weighed in on Birkhead's side, threatening to remove the baby from Stern's clutches herself, and in a brilliant hypothesis that was bound to steer all the money towards the child, Donna Hogan suggested that Anna had frozen some of J Howard Marshall's sperm, and that Danielynn was, after all these years, his biological child.

Larry Birkhead, who was serious about his claim, had already hired a lawyer to obtain a DNA test; in her lifetime, Anna's response to this had been 'In your dreams'. But after her death her funeral was delayed, in part so that the procedure could go ahead. On 10 April, the results of the DNA test were released: Larry Birkhead was the father, and Howard Stern would not contest the result.

But the fight is not over: Howard Stern, as the trustee of the estate and the attorney in charge of ensuring that large sums are delivered to Danielynn, has already made a reported $4 million in media fees, and holds a number of valuable cards. And as for Anna Nicole Smith? Well, she is far more famous now than she ever was before. Her legacy remains tangled up in money (how many millions are at stake?) and sex (how many fathers could there be?).

'In my heart, I still think she committed suicide,' says Eric Redding. 'You know, she was found in the nude, with a sheet over her, just like Marilyn Monroe - it's almost like she tried to mimic it. But she had a good life,' he adds, 'she liked being a tabloid queen. As long as she was in the news, she was happy.' No one can say, of course, what life she deserved, but it does look a lot like the life she designed.